Portal-eARC (10 page)

Nick debated with himself for what seemed a long time, but was actually only a few seconds.
I have to trust him if we’re going to make any of this work now.
“Walter, I agree with you completely,” he said finally.

Keldering’s look of relief was one of the rare uncontrolled expressions the agent had ever given. “You do? Then—”

“But this is not quite the time,” Glendale continued smoothly. “You see—unofficially and completely off the record—I will tell you that you’re entirely correct, and I’m very impressed by how you’ve put all the pieces together. But there are a few, very crucial, pieces that you’re missing of this puzzle.” As he explained, he found the sequence of expressions that crossed Keldering’s face almost comical.

“The General is
alive?
”

“He is. And given everything else, I think you can see what we plan to do.”

Keldering nodded, and then he began to look suspiciously at Glendale. “And you’re going to need
me
to keep everyone else from jumping the gun.”

“Please.”

“Nicholas, do you have
any
idea what you’re asking? If I have a reasonable bit of intel, I’m supposed to send it up the chain right away. Something like
this—”

He nodded sympathetically, but then smiled. “I know, Walter. But on the other hand…you came here privately, unofficially, to ask me. You were already
trying
to keep it private. If you weren’t ready to play ball, why did you come with your own bat and glove?”

Keldering couldn’t restrain a snort of laughter. “Okay, you got me. I knew you guys couldn’t possibly have deliberately killed people in cold blood, and I thought I knew the story…but you’ve added a few wrinkles. Damn. Nick, this isn’t going to be easy. You want to keep the EU happy, stop anyone from blowing the lid off the truth, and get the rescue project well underway while your people try to pull off a by-their-bootstraps rescue on their own, before you go public.”

“And we want to be able to get every one of the people responsible dead to rights,” said Glendale, this time with a hard edge in his voice. “They nearly killed some of my best friends, and did kill a hundred people who had trusted their lives to those people’s work.”

“
That
is going to be the
really
tricky part,” Keldering said slowly. “People like that—especially Osterhoudt, if he’s involved—are insulated, protected, and very much prepared for any accusations. And he’s not going to relax for quite a while.” A sudden smile spread across his face. “But we still have a few cards we haven’t played.” Keldering stood up.

“Such as?”

Keldering stopped in the doorway and grinned. “You know, I can’t attend his retirement party in six months, so why don’t I give Director Hughes a call? He might like an update on what his favorite protégé’ is
really
up to on Europa.”

The door slid shut, leaving Nicholas feeling better than he had in weeks.
We just might pull this off after all.

Chapter 12.

“So there’s
no
chance of repairing the reactor?” Madeline asked, looking mostly at Jackie but keeping an eye on everyone else in the conference room of
Munin
. This was a crucial factor, and she had to make sure that no decisions were made without as much certainty as possible.

Like most engineers, Jackie instinctively shied away from absolute certainty. Centuries of experience had taught the profession that real life machines and structures would fail—or, sometimes, survive—in ways that you simply wouldn’t have believed or anticipated. “Well…
no
chance?…Um, if we were to…” She paused for a moment, clearly thinking, then shook her head. “What am I saying? No, Maddie, there isn’t any way we’re fixing it. Oh, I could come up with some ridiculous maybe-possible scheme with the combination of A.J.’s super-dust, all the engineers we have, and some luck, but in this setting? No, that reactor’s shot, and it’s not getting fixed.”

Funny how we seem to go from triumphant confidence to crisis mode on a regular basis,
Maddie thought.
Now to navigate
this
crisis.
“All right, the
Nebula Storm
’s reactor is shot. What’s the next steps?”

“Well, first, we get the reactor and reactor-specific support components out,” Joe said. “There’s no purpose in keeping a damaged and potentially dangerous reactor onboard, and the thing—along with support components—weighs a
lot
. I know the “Keep our Solar System Clean” contingent will have kittens at the concept, but we’ve got to dump the weight when we can. No point in dragging our trash with us.”

“Makes sense, and I wouldn’t worry about the complaints; we’ll deal with that if and when we get home for them to whine at. But what next? How do we get ourselves home?”

The silence was not encouraging.
But there has to be a solution. We have too many resources for it to
not
be possible.
“Horst, what about the
Munin
’s main reactor? Couldn’t it run the Nebula Drive?”

Horst grimaced, wrinkling his usually handsome face so it looked like he was sucking on lemons spiced with habanero pepers. “
Ja
, yes, in theory. But…Madeline, you remember we did connect our reactor to your systems for the travel and landing to Europa.”

“Yes, which is one reason I asked.”

“That worked for a short time, but that was because it
was
a short time,” Horst said. “The connecting of the ships was done through an airlock for each of us and took up a great deal of space. We could afford that space for a few days, but it will be
months
—perhaps a year—for us to make it back to the Inner System and a location we can be rescued or make a good orbit and landing from ourselves. As it is, we will have to be taking turns in the rotating sections to reaccustom ourselves to real gravity and minimize degeneration of our bodies from constant low-g exposure, yes?”

Maddie nodded reluctantly. “I think I see your point. The twelve of us—thirteen, after we rescue the General—are crowded enough as it is, even though with the equipment on board
Munin
we have been able to set up those self-contained living quarters—not to mention the absolutely wonderfully designed showers—in additional insulated structures intended for the exploration and study teams. We simply cannot afford to sacrifice room for such a connection.” She looked over to Mia and A.J. Baker. “I don’t suppose we could
not
use the airlocks? Put in a dedicated—and out of the way—power conduit?”

Mia looked thoughtful, but A.J. didn’t even hesitate. “No chance in hell, Maddie. Maybe for
Munin
we could figure it out, but to put a nice out-of-the-way power conduit into
Nebula Storm
we’d have to run it right through the
hull
of
Nebula Storm
.”

She winced. No one knew better than she just how unyieldingly stubborn the composite alloy they simply called “Vault material” was. With what they had, she wasn’t even sure they
could
put a hole in that hull at all, let alone do so with enough precision and control to prevent them from wrecking something else in the interior.

“There’s another much bigger problem, too,” Dan Ritter said after a moment.

“So what’s
your
good news, Dan?” A.J. asked brightly.

“Well, it’s related to that bit about gravity. In order for us to manage that at all, we have to spin the ship and use those habitation modules—”

Horst nodded glumly, and Joe smacked his forehead. “And
Munin
wasn’t designed to spin, probably couldn’t be balanced while attached to us, and making a harness that allowed you to be transferring the power from
Munin
that was stationary to a rotating
Nebula Storm
…” Joe trailed off, then finished, “It’d be twice as big, and a
huge
potential point of failure unless we did a lot of engineering work on it. Slip rings or similar tricks…they’re just perfect invitations for wear.”

Horst shook his head. “Worse than that, Joe. Remember that we need to take turns? Well, unless
Munin
is going to be just left empty and all of us crowd into
Nebula Storm
, how would we do that when the one available airlock between the two ships was filled with the power connection?”

They were silent for a moment, then Helen spoke. “Speaking of the hab modules,” she said, looking at Joe, “Can we fix the one we sort of landed on?”

“Yes,” Joe said with confidence. “It got bent and squashed, but all the pieces are still there and we’ve got everything needed to fix it. So we’ll be able to spin up once we’re back in space.”

“That’s good,” Helen said.

Another silence. “How are we doing with
Munin
and preparations to visit the General?” Maddie asked finally.
Might as well touch on other subjects.

“Going good there,” Brett said. “We’ve got good models up on all the critical systems and we think we know how to fix them. It’s going to take quite a while—our good friend Fitzgerald sure knew how to screw things up. But between the resources on
Odin
and our know-how…well,
Odin
’s never going to be pretty again, but she’ll be a functioning space station, anyway.”

The last line tugged at something.
Space station instead of spaceship
. But why?
Odin
couldn’t move anymore, not in any significant way. She retained enough functionality to orient herself in different ways, but neither of her drives were…

“Joe,” she said slowly. “And Jackie…When we threw
Nebula Storm
together, we used the reactor for the Ceres colony as our main power source, right?”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Plus a big bank of RTSC batteries to fake up the NERVA drive.”

“And bolted the spare nozzle from
Nobel
onto
Nebula Storm
’s rear,” confirmed Jackie. “Why?”

“Oh, oh, oh, I think I see where you’re going, Maddie, and it might work, god-
Damn
it just might work!” A.J. said, a grin spreading across his face.

The others glanced at him in puzzlement; he looked to Maddie; she just smiled and nodded.
He loves explanations, and I think he
does
get it.
“Well,” A.J. said, giving her a quick smile of thanks, “
Odin
’s pretty much kaput, but her
reactors
—both of them—are still intact, and the one is just a tweaked drive unit from the original
Nike
, just like the one on
Nobel—”

Joe and Jackie started grinning too, and the smiles started to spread. Horst cut in: “—and the reason
Odin
can’t use its NERVA isn’t because the drive’s completely shot, but because the
drive nozzle
was completely shredded! And—”

Suddenly it seemed as though everyone was talking at once:

“—well, that’s not completely true, some of the secondary support systems were damaged,” Mia Svensen said cautiously, but she, too, was smiling. “And we’ll have to do some careful design models, I think
Nobel
had modified the nozzle design for its own applications—”

“—need to figure out how much water we’ll need, might need several trips—”

“—and Larry, the orbital change needed, not much I think, yes?”

“—transfer valve to move the water from
Munin
to
Odin
, sort of a reverse, we never thought we’d have to do the opposite—”

“—cutting tools that might do the job—”

She raised her voice. “People.
EVERYONE, please!
”

The room went suddenly quiet. She smiled at them. “From the general look and sound, can I assume that we think this is a good solution?”

“It’s a damn near
perfect
solution, Maddie,” Joe said fondly. “With
Odin
’s orbit going in to Io and out about to Europa, it’s going to be tracing something like an old-fashioned Spirograph pattern around, which means over time it will get closer and then farther and farther around the circle, eventually catching up to us. But it does mean that it’s going to be a pain to transfer back and forth, especially at different points of the cycle.”

“And
Odin
has so many resources on board, even in its cut-down state, that we just don’t have,” Mia said. “If we can get it enough reaction mass and put on a nozzle that lets it shift orbit enough to turn to an orbit around
Europa…!
”

“…it becomes a satellite filled with resources we can access a lot more easily and reliably,” finished Helen, who certainly understood the basics of the situation. “I guess we can’t land it, though.”

Horst snorted at the thought of landing the massive wreck. “I would think not.”

“What about our other objections to the situation with
Munin
and
Nebula Storm
?” she asked. “Do they still hold if we add
Odin
into the picture?”

“I don’t think so,” Mia said. “There are cutting tools and materials aboard
Odin
which I think could manage to put an access conduit through even the
Nebula Storm
’s hull; they would be too large and power intensive to be practical to transfer from
Odin
to us here on Europa, but if we assume that we will do all the design and preparation work ahead of time, we could bring
Nebula Storm
up when we’re ready to leave, then shut her down and work on her in orbit; the
Odin
would provide more than sufficient living space which is protected by
Odin
’s radiation shielding so that we wouldn’t need
Nebula Storm
to maintain her drive at that time.”

“So we would be able to put a connection for power that would still allow us to transfer back and forth,” Joe said, “and with the tools and materials on all three ships we could probably make one that will survive the rotational demands for long enough.”

Brett nodded, already starting on his simulations via remote. “It won’t be easy at all, but I think it’s all workable. The only question is whether
Nebula Storm
can actually tow
Odin
. I mean, whether it can tow it
effectively
. I know it’s a matter of pretty much constant force so you could in theory tow
anything
, but is the Nebula Drive able to give us enough acceleration to get home in reasonable time?”